Thursday, July 13, 2006

In "Lapsing Into a Comma," I mocked my neighborhood coffee bar for using the unnecessary retronym "country muffin" to distinguish a muffin from an English muffin. After all, I pointed out, referring to an English muffin as a muffin would be like referring to table tennis as "tennis."

The sad thing, half a decade later, is that hearing table tennis referred to as tennis would no longer surprise me:

I've heard people say "custard" when they mean the form of ice cream known as frozen custard. Custard is a very real and extant substance that still needs a name of its own, people. Do you refer to ice cream as "cream"?

I heard a radio host introduce a coach from "the Olympics -- the Special Olympics!" The second part was presented as an amplifier, not a correction.

On a lighter retronym note, I recently caught the "Simpsons" episode in which Kent Brockman refers to "sky stars" to distinguish the luminous celestial objects from the likes of "Matthew Modine and Charlene Tilton."

Hey, let's have a contest! If stars need to be called sky stars, what modifier do we need to insert before "custard" to make it clear we mean custard? And how about "the [blank] Olympics"?

In defense of "custard" being used instead of "frozen custard," my guess is that there's typically some context present. If I'm talking about going to get some custard at my local frozen confection shop, I think it's pretty well understood that I mean frozen custard -- same as if I were to say that I'm getting some cookie dough.

"Getting some cookie dough" is more like "getting some chocolate" -- yeah, in context, that makes sense. It's a flavor. But custard is custard. Even simply freezing it doesn't make it that kind of frozen custard. If I say "I'm getting some cream!" at Baskin-Robbins, that doesn't make cream = ice cream.

You know you’re talking about backformation, right? And that “forward slash” became necessary to differentiate it from “backslash”? (For some people, at least. And some others cannot dictate an URL without mistaking slash for backslash.)

Back-formation is a different thing, though I guess you could call the process related. I understand that backslashes exist, but people who mean "backslash" say "backslash," just as people who say "table tennis" say "table tennis" -- a mention of "slash" should not prompt the question "You mean backslash?" If we're dealing with people who think URLs ever take backslashes, we need to start at a whole different stage of hand-holding anyway.

Depending on the local custard-serving custom, I suppose one of these modifiers might work for the traditional variety: conventional, normal, regular, room-temperature, lukewarm.

Then there's "custard custard." You've heard this use before: "Honey, could you pick up some butter butter [or 'real butter'] at the store?"

I can think of one example of what might be called a retro-retronym (in American usage): "regular gasoline." We used to have gasoline, which happened to contain lead. Later, we had regular and unleaded gas. Then the leaded kind was outlawed, and unleaded became the new regular.

How about the increasingly common "free gift"? I'm not quite sure that it's a "true retronym," but it's close. Also very much in use lately: "two-parent family."

Let the Games begin. The International Olympic Committee doesn't even use the word "Olympics." They refer only to the Olympic Games, the Olympic Summer Games, the Olympic Winter Games, and the Games.

Full cream milk is called 'Fat Milk' by my mother (milk with lots of fat in it) and 'Thin Milk' by my father (milk for thin people)

Skimmed milk (don't know what you call it in the States -- I mean milk with all the cream taken out) is called 'Thin Milk' by my mother (milk for people trying to become thin) and 'Fat Milk' by my father (milk for fat people).

"Two-parent family" is a wonderful retronym example. Another great one I came across on a list of them: George H.W. Bush!

With gasoline, "regular" is the opposite of "premium" (or, way back when, "ethyl"). I still hear "unleaded" a lot even though there is no "leaded" -- it's in the standard boilerplate of the price-reporting people.

Re: "If we're dealing with people who think URLs ever take backslashes, we need to start at a whole different stage of hand-holding anyway."

Those dark ages are indeed dawning. Not only do I hear references to a "/" as a "backslash" every week, but I'm also directed to "log on" to Web sites that have no login barrier or to "download" material that I'm actually just supposed to -- what's the word? oh yeah -- "read."

Actually, backslashes work just as well as "forward" slashes do when you're typing URLs. Whether you're visiting http://theslot.blogspot.com/ or http:\\theslot.blogspot.com\, you'll get to the same place.

Thanks, "woman"; that is news to me -- I hadn't thought to try. Still: While it's nice of the browser makers to auto-correct the error (and note that the backslashes do get changed to slashes when a page loads), it is indeed an error to use the word "backslash" in spelling out a Web address.

Retronyms and backformations really aren't that similar. Backformations involve reanalyzing a word and then breaking off a supposed morpheme (like taking burglar and creating burgle from it on analogy of words farmer and farm).

I haven't seen anything but frozen custard (you DO realize that they call it frozen custard because "Ice Cream" would imply that there is cream in the product, which there isn't?) called "custard" in years. "Custard" has become "pudding," unless you're at a fancy restaurant where they call it "flan."

There are more painful examples, notably "single-family home," which used to be "house," and "one-year anniversary."